Anonymous declares war after French firm trademarks its logo

A French company trying to trademark the Anonymous logo and slogan for commercial purposes has inspired an angry response from a team claiming to be affiliated with the hacking group.

The company Early Flicker, or E-Flicker, has registered the headless man logo and the slogan 'We are Anonymous, We do not forgive, We do not forget. Expect us' with the French National Institute of Industrial Property. This would allow the company to produce and sell merchandising bearing the logo, and potentially to take action against others who use it in France.

"Their arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go unpunished," promised the group in a video on YouTube. "Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet and the ninety nine per cent will not stop until the registration has been revoked and a public apology has been made. The name of Anonymous will not be the whore of the world."

In what it is calling Operation AnonTrademark the group has vowed to shut down any online activities conducted by the company and want the trademarking cancelled. Given the group's prior conduct, the management at Early Flicker might want to rethink their strategy.

The last company to go up against Anonymous directly was security consultants at HBGary Federal, who claimed to have infiltrated Anonymous high command and were going to present a paper on the case at the BSides conference in San Francisco. Less than 24 hours after the company made the announcement, it was comprehensively pwned and had its email servers scraped and published.

The hacking attack revealed that HBGary Federal had been touting its services to combat WikiLeaks with a proposed plan to smear journalists who appeared sympathetic to the whistleblowing site and feeding false documents to the website to discredit it. The firm's head Aaron Barr was forced to step down and the company was sold shortly afterwards.

Given the relative ease with which Anonymous were able to get into a security firm's servers, an online retailer should cause few problems. El Reg would advise Early Flicker to batten down the hatches and prepare for boarders. ®